Because of Emily Dickinson

Not fishing, just sitting, watching eagles on the far side of the lake watching the water. Must everything in the end be a performance.

 

Letting go in the sense of no longer keeping anything but memories. All rivers reach the sea, all seas reach up to Heaven.

 

Losing so much of what mattered yet acquiring this new way of living in the world, quiet and non-dramatic. Patches of grass on which robins pause, tilt their heads.

 

What happened to me because of Emily Dickinson's poems and letters. We are so far beyond what we can put into language now, aren’t we.

 

Afternoon passing, crows strutting where last year the blackberries grew tangled and wild. Something opens and you walk through and the price is forgetting what came before.

 

I loved leaping off the quarry walls, everybody in awe but I trusted the air and I trusted the water, and it wasn’t a big deal, it was just what I was in those days. Rolling a joint, remembering learning how to back in Vermont, all those years ago.

 

But are you that kind of girl? Something about the red-winged blackbirds I can no longer recall, just remember how happy they used to make me in spring, how I used to linger by the old fire pond watching them, gun forgotten in the grass beside me.

 

They kept saying “don’t get carried away” and I couldn’t explain how it wasn’t up to me, it was just what happened. Hollows inside trees I used to long to live inside.

 

How quiet the afternoon becomes so I write a little, experimenting with the twenty sentences, which lately have been stifled, as if refusing anymore to have a damned thing to do with me. The blind horse crying out all afternoon.

 

This, too, is my interior. We talk about his deceased wife, we talk about what one does with clothing, and we talk about something else too but now is not the time or place to say it.